A Lawyer's Perspective - Competing Considerations

One of my issues is it feels like us fans have been hung out to dry. The fans deserve to know what happened and not in lawyer speak. We all rallied around because we were told Michigan was going to fight like hell and it was WAR. None of that SEEMS to have been true. The fans pay the bills and we deserve answers. 

 this suddenly ended with seemingly the worst possible outcome, 

I'm certainly not happy that he can't coach the 1000th win or the OSU game, but this is not the worst outcome.  He could have been forbidden from coaching the team during the week.  He also could have had additional games added to the suspension.

Presumably, the Big Ten told us, "If you fight us, you'd better win or we're adding more to the punishment."  And (as Sam Webb and some others have hinted) we may not have been fully confident that we would win in front of the judge.

I’m going to add another thing with this Lawyers post. This is how innocent people go to jail. They are forced into a plea deal because they might lose at trail. Fear is a hell of a motivator. 

Thanks for the morning positivity XM.

Let’s go Blue!

Take your frustration out on the field.

Everybody should go on Yelp and give Williams and Connelly 1-star reviews for their work here.

If BoR did this without any regard for Harbaugh or the team, then UofM deserve to be mediocre. Then I hope Harbaugh leaves. No reason to support the university when they want money. Fuck them. That is how I feel this morning. I am not in favor of tarnishing our own alumni name to protect the brand.

I stopped reading when you said Harbaugh was not a named party in the litigation. He was in fact the lead party. The board of regents was second. 

I had a few hours of windshield time driving home last night after the news broke and I'm in agreement with some here that the only thing that makes sense is that the university learned additional facts material to the case that would be presented in court proceedings either today, during discovery, or at a later trial. Whether the B1G knew those facts or the university learned of them as its lawyers interviewed coaches who would later be subpoenaed doesn't matter.

My own speculation leads me to believe that an assistant did know - at a minimum. It's also possible that an assistant was in some way involved in what Stalions was doing, The only way I can see Harbaugh backing down is to protect the coach from a career-ending, public admission of guilt.

Harbaugh is the one guy I can imagine bearing the burden of suspension for that reason. He's a person of genuinely deep faith and while his values lead him to say things that conflict with the social and political beliefs of many people, it is also gives him a perfect example of taking on the guilt of others and accepting punishment on their behalf. If I'm correct about why the university caved and all parties settled in what appears to be defeat for the plaintiffs, that example he professes to believe in every Sunday (and every other day) could not have been lost on him.

Non-lawyer take. Something came up that we are not aware of.  If nothing changed between last week and this in terms of the facts, then it would make no sense to back out of the court proceeding at the last minute. At least not based on what we've been told. It is very strange to put the fans, alumni, and supporters in this kind of position - it destroys credibility, and the solidarity that had been built, the decision makers must know this, so to do it - in light of this, means there is something we don't know. Could be many things, but I don't like what it implies.  

"The Conference agreed to close its investigation, and the University and Coach Harbaugh agreed to accept the three-game suspension. Coach Harbaugh, with the University's support, decided to accept this sanction to return the focus to our student-athletes and their performance on the field."

This statement does not align with what they were saying for more than one week. Also Harbaugh was under no obligation to go to the court proceeding, so it wasn't about more time coaching. 

Could it also be true that the judge gave counsels a heads up on how he was going to rule and asked everyone to avoid the media circus?

Fuck all the potential reasons. You tell your team to keep fighting all the time. What message does it send to just up and quit?  This is an instance where you go down swinging.

If the team was angry last week how can they be anything but deflated this week? We just sent a message that we quit on them. 
 

Need to find suitable candidates to run against current Regents.

Well the unity we had last Friday is fractured for an unknown reason. The one thing we can rally around is fuck the B1G and the other teams in it, and beat Ohio.

I’m betting Jim is gone. He shows up for the press conference Monday all relaxed and “old Jim”, the insiders go silent, Clink went silent, Michigan calls off the dogs with the B1G. 

Nothing against the University, the entire B1G has clearly broken all precedent in expressing they will continue to persecute Michigan while he’s here. He loves Michigan, so he’s leaving. (And he’s giving Moore an audition.)

We all need to start following flightaware again.

I agree with OP.  The suspension is a done deal (we hope). I imagine the coaching staff and team are focused on what's ahead of them. Control what you can control, next play mentality, etc. -- there's plenty of metaphors coaches and players preach that apply here, and I have to believe that the team buys into them in a big way right now.

However, a huge question remains for the athletic department and the administration, which is  what to do going forward.  The NCAA has governed college athletics for years in a way that gives off a constant, odious stench. And now the conference does as well. While fans are easily and understandably lured by the spectacle of scandal and narratives that lend themselves to readily distinguishing good from evil, football should be mostly about football.  And the value to the university of its flagship athletic program should be the value generated (revenue and building up of the university's brand) and the lessons that can be learned by the athletes (and even by the fans) from participating in the sport.

If Michigan really wants to be a leader, it has to find a way to leave the B1G (or reform it in ways that do not seem possible right now) and leave the NCAA - hopefully speeding it's end as quickly as possible. There's no headline I would like to see more than "Michigan issues death penalty to NCAA".  As a side benefit many of our favorite media hacks would be forced to divert their efforts elsewhere, hopefully (but unlikely) finding new and better ways to contribute to humanity.  

The thing is-in my best effort to don a hat of objectivity, this is a stunningly bizarre case of such minor consequence that seems to defy all logic. As far as I know, Jim Harbaugh remains non-implicated in any reasonable, direct way to the core allegations. And that "cheeseburger gate", also a monumentally trivial matter, continues to lack resolution...it leaves any reasonable person grasping at straws in making an attempt to understand what is at the heart of all this. Tell why the "best" conclusion is not that this is a conspiratorial vendetta against Jim Harbaugh???

the client's family is all gung-ho about going to trial and outraged by a plea that the client is offered but they don't have the big picture and don't know or appreciate some very critical facts. 

This one really hit home for me XM. Though not criminal, Having spent the last 18 months of my life in a major legal battle it's astonishing how many wannabe lawyers in your life come out of the woodwork to give you legal advice. They might know a fraction of my situation and they're pestering me about what they think I should do. Like my spending $400/hour for hours upon hours every week consulting with lawyers on what to do is irrelevant, and someone who took an intro to law class at WCC is giving me a hard time about my decisions and trying to get me to question my own legal counsel because well don't you know that all lawyers just want your money and will always recommend the most pricey option available. And whenever that happens I imagine I'm Longshanks meeting my son's boyfriend 

We all know what happens next. This is why I'm having a hard time getting mad about this decision. As you stated, we don't know what we don't know 

Losing the court case would have amounted to the same situation as now - except that the fans and players would be even more galvanized and energized with the "vs everybody" mentality.

Surrendering feels so deflating right now. Hope the team feels this L and realizes how much it sucks.

How was he, represented by Mars, not a party to the lawsuit?

Thanks, XM.

Maybe not the best reagents?

It has probably been said multiple times already somewhere in this angst filled Blog, but here I go: As an alum of Michigan I now feel deep embarrassment for UM.

I kept telling associates “wait for everything to come out, we are not dirty.” When the U power structure aligned to fight back, I became even more sure that we were basically innocent. I felt this way, because the smart thing to do if we knew we were dirty would be to cooperate.

The regents undid all my faith by this last-minute capitulation.  

Unless they announce that there is new and more reliable information that led to this last minute collapse, the majority of the public will believe that we are, at best, “a confederacy of dunces,” or at worst cheating cheaters who cheat.

In my uniformed opinion I think we just shit the bed.

What worries me the worst about all of this is the players feeling as demoralized as most of us seem to feel this morning.

I went to put on my U-M sweater this morning, which I do every morning, and paused wondering if I wanted to do that today.  Made me realize, how must the players feel?  They've heard, as much as us if not more, how U-M is going to fight this and has Harbaugh's back, etc...

I'm sure coach talked to them and gave them the reasoning, but it still has to have an effect.

Are they destroying all references to "Michigan vs. Everybody"?  I fully expected us to show up for Michigan vs Maryland and Michigan vs. ohio.  We didn't show up for Michigan vs. Everybody...